Rear wheel-driven F-style track racer with quite a different steering and a powerful acceleration.

About this creation

The second and current vehicle in the series is kind of a combination of a race car and a garage-built car. I described it to a buddy as "a F1 car that watched too much Mad Max"... and I think that pretty much nails it.

The design in general wasn't intended to end up as a F-racer at all. I figured out what I want when I was done with the rear construction and ended up having to make sure, with the few possibilities left now that the battery pack was mounted, that the whole thing doesn't break through in the middle. That made the cage idea arise, which kinda had me go for the F-style, as doing regular straight bars would look strange, I figured, as I chose another free wheels attempt.

You should also be able to see some of the design details here, for example the red racing seatbelts I thought were looking cool, or the rather different rear spoiler. The mudguards are also coming out nicely in this one, even though you can see that they're perfectly positioned in the topdown view better.

This perspective shows most of the cool features I put into this car. The pretty compact-for-it's-strength rear suspension and the seat that's actually working out to put a Lego Technic figure in there. The steering is hard to see, however a personal creation that I'm sure noone did before - the motorized axle that goes from the back to the front actually ends up in a kind of lever that moves the steering bar to the left and the right without the use of geras or anything for the left/right movement at all. The motorized axle itself is geared up heavily, so it's a lot slower and more powerful.
This system proved to work really well on all kinds of stress, and it's really reliable and well to control. Unfortunately, the universal joints are having quite a bit of moveability in their nature, meaning the wheels have a bit of a moving tolerance at all times.
Additionally, I'd like to mention that it has somewhat of a Hand Of God steering. I'm saying 'somewhat' because the steering wheel's direction is opposite to the wheel's turning direction, and unfortunately there's not enough room in the front to retain the current efficiency of the steering and fix that little flaw. Either way, noone ever noticed it, and most people who saw it complimented on the HOD feature, meaning I guess I'm fine as it stands...

I'd like to drag special attention to the driver being exactly in the center of the vehicle both width- and length-wise, and that the length of the area behind the rear wheels and in front of the front wheels is about the same length, which means a pretty good stability and nice judgement of the driver on what the vehicle is going to be doing upon actions. That's something I planned before even starting to build, and another thing the F-concept helped me with.

The bottom view, as always, shows a lot of the internals. You can see the two large motors on the back powering one wheel each, as well as the steering motor inbetween them that is entended all the way to the front. You can also see I doubled the friction gears on the steering to make sure that power gets delivered to the steering bar before it starts to slip (which happened a lot with a single friction gear).

As for the motorization, I think I came up with a quite ingenious way of putting a motorized wheel with geared-down power for more speed on a suspended mount in so few space. From the motors to the universal joints powering the wheels, there's only two units of space - one if which taken up for the gear, half for the suspended arm and half for the mount on the motor. It started as pretty fragile, however I managed to fix it with a few 1-unit-long axles I cut together.

The overall motor assembly looks pretty awesome, I think, and it's an interesting fact that I didn't start with the idea to put the steering motor there right away, but instead put it there after the whole frame of the car was done.

Last but not least, you can see how the seatbelts on the lower part got their color, as I put the giant red liftarms in there for additional stability as well.

Another cool feature is the completely removeable battery construction for easy and fast replacement of batteries. You can see it has half of the seat on it, which is actually totally unnoticeable on the put-together model. I'm convinced enough of the system to describe the steps you'd need to reassemble it, so you can see for yourself that it's no hassle at all.

reattach the cable to the battery

put the rear part of the battery pack on the mounts inbefore the rear suspension line

push the battery pack down so it sticks on the light gray pin conncector

put the two seperate black pins in the rear part of the battery to fix it to the frame

On another topic, if you see the switch on the right-hand side from the seat: That one was used to switch directions of one of the engines, as both are activated by the same input, however they need to spin mirrored. It's probably not a too elegant solution, however I don't have a second remote to control the motors seperately, so this is the only way I can do it (nevermind making one rear wheel go forward and one the other way would be pretty non-smart...

I fixed a lot of problems I had for my first performance car, and it took me a lot less time to build, as I was done in about two weeks with everything instead of remodelling it for half a year. I also tried to work with parts I already had and not order anything new, however I had to get a few parts, however I had to order the red liftarms for the seatbelts.
I still didn't manage to include a return to center steering feature or a proper HOG steering, which is a requirement for the next model definately. I'd also like to return to 4WD for my next model... but there's only vague plans yet.

As always, please leave comments or ask any questions you have. I hope you like it, and I hope you stay tuned for coming projects.

Cool! The shaping is done excellent! I agree that this has a lot of similarities with my car! I like the chromed wheels, did you did that yourself? It's weird that this doesn't get more attention. 5/5 :-)